July 1: Fine showers. Gen’l Howe’s Army arrived at Sandy Hook
July 2: Rain'd hard Cool'd the air much
July 3: Cool day.
July 4: Cool. The Independance of the States Voted & declared. Robert Treat Paine diary, 1776

Wait a minute, I think we're missing something though. Sometimes I use polish on my shoes to cover up little scuffs and to liven the leather up but it doesn't necessarily make them shiny. Other times I use wax on my shoes to make them shine. I think there's a difference. Is anybody with me?

Well, polish can be a verb or a noun. The noun refers to the stuff in the little tins that we put on our shoes. We then polish (v) them to make them shine. Or we shine them to make them Polish.

Wait, that's not right. The verbs, polish and shine, are, in my experience, interchangeable. There's not some thing we have done to our shoes (or do ourselves) that is a polish rather than a shine. That's what I took the OP to be asking. My answer is that, as verbs, they mean the same thing.

Plagiarized self-help signature:
It has been six months since my last shoe purchase. But I'm weakening.

After looking up the word "polish" in the dictionary it seems that to polish something could mean to "shine" it (so sometimes we polish our shoes to make them "shine), but it could also mean to "smooth" it (so sometimes we polish our shoes to make them smooth, i.e., to remove scuffs) so the two words are not exactly interchangeable.

I know sometimes I "polish" my shoes and they do not "shine" afterwards.

Wait a minute, I think we're missing something though. Sometimes I use polish on my shoes to cover up little scuffs and to liven the leather up but it doesn't necessarily make them shiny. Other times I use wax on my shoes to make them shine. I think there's a difference. Is anybody with me?

Semantics are at work here. I call canned shoe polish "polish" and use it to create shine on my shoes. I call jars or tubes of shoe cream "shoe cream" and use them for color, and to a lesser extent, to condition the leather.

The people at Sky Valet seem to think there's a difference - I was under the understanding that you use the term &quot;polish&quot; to do any sort of minor scuff repair/conditioning, hence odoreater's definition. Shining is a completely superficial matter, which is purely cosmetic, and gives the shoe a high gloss.

what i meant to say was shining and polishing commonly are interchanged when used to describe cleaning and polishing your shoes.
i dont think there is any technical difference;
you polish with wax polish to get a shine and you also using polish when shining your shoes.